The Collection and Analysis of Large Quantities of Healthcare Data, Can Help Make Medicine More Efficient and Effective

The Collection and Analysis of Large Quantities of Healthcare Data, Can Help Make Medicine More Efficient and Effective

As a young man, I worked during the day and went to school at night to complete my high school diploma. In Mozambique I often felt like my life depended on miracles, and I’m sure I experienced many, but at the end of the day, I also believed that my hard work and persistence were worth something and that my dreams were worth fighting for.

Fast forward to many years, two children, and one huge move to the United States later. I was in a different kind of struggle. My wife was in labor with our child. As her blood pressure dropped it was no longer a matter of having a successful delivery. My wife’s life was at stake. Her body was taxed and she was in a great deal of pain. Her medical providers made the decision to administer a drug that would help her heart recover efficiency and would save her life, but my son, still sharing the same life-line, also received the medication. My son’s heart could not tolerate the drug. The priority of his birth quickly went from a natural progression of coming into the world to needing to be stabilized and monitored as soon as possible. My wife was rushed into an emergency C-section surgery. 

The next thing I knew I was on a jet with my boy headed to Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City. Now, my son’s life was at stake. It might have been a forty-five-minute flight, but it felt like an eternity as I sat helplessly watching the team of healthcare providers who monitored my baby’s life through a small plastic incubator box. I felt helpless, and yet I knew that we were fortunate to have a healthcare team, the resources, and the technology to fight for my son’s life. I had fought many times in my life with much less. With the cards stacked in our favor, this time I knew it wasn’t up to me to pull through for my son. I stood by and watched the skills of those dedicated healthcare professionals who saved both my wife and son’s lives. I am forever grateful for them.

Yet, I would not have wanted to be in the shoes of the medical provider, who had to decide whether to push the medication to save my wife’s life while leveraging the possibility of losing my son’s. I’m sure such decisions are not appreciated by medical provider’s either. No matter how much experience they have, a Doctor is in the business of saving lives an improving standards of living, not risking other people’s lives and putting their careers on the line. I’m sure these decisions are not made easily.

That is why I am particularly inspired by the biomedical informatics research of Dr.Kensaku Kawamoto, who explains that the use of decision support systems in healthcare can provide clinicians specific assessments or recommendations to aid in decision making, and which enhance the healthcare experience. The collection and analysis of large quantities of data, presented in the right format, can help make medicine more efficient and effective. Integrating computer science into the healthcare equation can decrease human error, expand the breadth of data that is utilized to make decisions, improve patient outcomes, and reduce risk as well. I believe that technology can help bridge the gap between our complex human biology and the science of medicine.